>One of the reasons I would really like to see a professional association of programmers. There are far too many bad practices which I have seen put millions of dollars at risk, human lives at risk, but programmers demand freedom to write code their way - no matter how may times authors and scholars list real best practices and no matter how stupidly it ends up. A surgeon doesn't argue with another surgeon that a twig is his preference over a scalpel.

And the main reason why it will never happen is that the "best practice" can't be defined for each language and framework and database. Just look at books about design patterns - they contain at least three patterns which are not just not applicable to VFP, but actually unnecessary. Ditto with what Hank said the other day about MVC in Fox - unnecessary, it solves a problem which we don't have.

What can be put into some kind of a rule book is, by nature, a set of general dos and do-nots (don't allow SQL insertion, don't allow writing directly into tables, don't allow RI violations, don't violate normal forms (without a very good reason), don't leave errors unhandled, have one naming convention, avoid ambiguous names, don't have pieces of code which do two things...). Beyond that, I'm afraid anything more specific would be again someone pushing their own platform, or pushing that platform's standards upon others.

Writing such a document would have to overcome one major obstacle: very few people are proficient in more than 3-4 platforms, and even they must be, by nature of things, thin or obsolete in at least one of them. Now try to compose a body which would have enough people who could write a good enough document, such that you would volunteer to abide by it.